Vitamin C puts the brakes on cancer cell growth

A half century ago, Linus Pauling began his pioneering research into how vitamin C impacts health (http://www.naturalnews.com/025802.html[2]). Now, almost 25 years after Pauling’s death, a new study backs up his contention that vitamin C has remarkable healing and protective benefits. In fact, now scientists have discovered how vitamin C may put the brakes on the growth of cancer cells.

Margreet Vissers, associate professor at the University of Otago’s Free Radical Research Group in New Zealand[3], headed the study which was just published in the journal Cancer Research. “Our results[4] offer a promising and simple intervention to help in our fight against cancer[5], at the level of both prevention and cure,” Dr.Vissers said in a statement to the press.

She pointed out that the role of vitamin C[6] in cancer treatment has been debated for years, with many anecdotal accounts claiming vitamin C can help in both the prevention and treatment[7] of cancer. In earlier studies conducted by Dr. Vissers, she demonstrated the vitamin’s importance in keeping cells healthy. And these findings suggested that vitamin C might be able to limit diseases such as cancer that involve cells that go haywire. In the case of a malignancy, for example, cells have unregulated growth.

So Dr. Vissers and her New Zealand research[10] team decided to investigate whether vitamin C levels were lower in patients[11] with endometrial tumors[12]. They also looked to see whether these low vitamin C levels correlated with the aggressiveness of a malignancy and the resistance of a tumor to medical therapy[13].

The results? Tumors were less able to accumulate vitamin C when compared with normal healthy tissue and a lack of vitamin C allowed tumors to survive and grow more easily. Tumors with low vitamin C levels were found to contain more of a protein dubbed HIF-1 which helps cancer thrive and spread, even under conditions of stress.

The findings are important because they provide evidence for the first time of a relationship between HIF-1 and levels of vitamin C levels in cancerous tumors. And it appears treating cancer patients with adequate amounts of vitamin C might well reduce HIF-1, help limit the rate of tumor growth and increase the responsiveness to tumors to therapy. Vitamin C might even prevent the formation of solid tumors in the first place, according to Dr. Vissers media statement.